On a given day my father would stop in front of the house to pick us up. He would ring the bell, and wait for us on the sidewalk in his teardrop sunglasses and checkered shirt and jeans. Me and my sister would come out with a number of bags, boxes, plushes firmly hugged with one hand, all the stuff would be loaded in a rush by my father onto the car. My parents would say hi to each other, and barely nod and away we'd go.

However sad and disorienting and sometimes scary, moving was also some kind of feast because of all the expectancy both my parents had-- to get rid of the kids for a while, or to welcome them. To us kids moving every given months was what the obscure ways of the world had conceived for our lives. It wasn't questionable nor it was possible, since we had no past experience to compare our lives to, to imagine different ways to deal with our "separated parents". It was not our call so there was no resistance from our side.

Milan was pretty much the same back then. Granted, some of the buildings now don't exist anymore, and some of the streets have changed line of march. All the shops have changed their signs and many have changed name, and there's more advertising around and much less people speaking with a milanese accent. There were kids running around freely back then, on bicycles and skates and with dogs, and less people and activities from around the globe, and no african or indian shops that I remember of. There were no cell phones and cars were less shiny and smaller.
A part of little things like that, it was the same city. Traffic was all around, the cars honked, the orange buses hissed and puffed tilting forward at the stops, unbalancing the folks on board. The air was just as dusty to breathe, and tall plane trees stood in the dark long avenues wet of shiny bodies of parked cars described by the wires of the trolleybuses. The city was busy doing, not caring to show and explain and give a meaning to anything else, pretty much like it is now.

Back at my mother's there was a small garden in the back. When my parents split up the garden quickly deteriorated, since my mother had no feeling or interest or patience for the plants and things like that. So up to where my memory goes, I recall that garden as a sort of adventurous wild mess, where plants grew disorderly, insects thrived, the dog defecated, the cats of the neighborhood fought, and occasionally some thief threw in a emptied purse just snatched from one of the many prostitutes that worked on the streets in that area. Later junkies started to climb in at night for a fix and left used syringes after them, dirty of blood and lost in the grass. But nobody used the garden anymore by then.

Anyway, there was nothing like it at my father's. He lived with his wife and my stepbrother in an apartment at the sixth floor, connected to a long common balcony-like area, upon which all the apartments had their entrance. They said it was the typical milanese behind of a condominium, it was called a "ballatoio" and was to be considered something very beautiful and vernacular and democratic because shared. But it wasn't very joyful as they seemed to imply. It was strange to see all the other families from there, how they lived, and how they all had fights almost every night. My father and his wife had fights too so it seemed a characteristic. It was like if the unhappiness was going to be always visible from the ballatoio-- like in a mirror of your own domestic unhappiness, but the joy was hidden instead.

It was strange to have our bathroom outside of the apartment and also the fact that us three kids slept in the same room, and had breakfast together and in the early mornings walked together over the bridge across the shunting lines of Garibaldi F.S. to catch the bus to school, and did homework together and all the rest. At my mother's a timeline didn't existed, all the habits and activities were your own, but at my father's all the events of the day had their moment, unmistakably on time. And he was scary and crazy where my mother was inoffensive, although crazy her own way, like when she brought men over to sleep and we could hear everything when they fucked or when, on summer nights, she suddenly cried for help because a big dark moth had entered her room and us kids had to save her from it.

One day in my ten or so years old, we were probably at the end of a meal at my father's and I started one of my occasional spontaneous moments of public consideration about something that I had just realized. I said that both kinds of life that me and my sister were leading in the two apartments were annoying after a while, for one reason or the other. I really said "annoying" or maybe, "heavy", or "ugly". Who knows what my vocabulary was back then? It was good for us, I went on, to know that a way out was always possible, at the end of the period of stay. I was pretty sure I was saying something obvious, and positive in its acceptance of the state of the things. I thought my parents knew how unbearable they were.
But my father felt otherwise. He didn't know or wanted to know. At my words he looked disturbed, and disappointed, and then enraged. He took it personally and wasn't convinced of my good intentions at all. His rage mounted, words were barked. Doors were slammed. I got scared and confused. I wasn't sure of what exactly disappointed my father so much but I knew I had to feel guilty about it.
And since I had to feel guilty about it, I wasn't so sure about my consideration either anymore. Maybe it was bad to know to have a way out. Or it was bad to feel the annoyance of a certain kind of life. It was bad anything that made my father go crazy anyway.

Today when I think about family episodes like this one, I know what's the nastier thing about them: that stupid sense of guilt tied to feelings of liberation and independence and acceptance. That really ruins everything.
( And that's not even what I wanted to talk about. I only wanted to talk about the feeling of the city during the trips from one place to the other-- instead I came out with one of those family-story-post that seem to always need too many details and explanations. It's the end of it anyway. )